Offbeat Eats

One of the shortcomings of the greater Upper Valley area is that we’ve got a bit of a shortage of breakfast spots, especially if you are looking for something a bit more varied than “American Diner”. But in early 2025, we had a pretty big shift in White River Junction: the former Piecemeal Pies (which, after five years of business, shuttered abruptly in 2023 during bankruptcy proceedings) finally got remodeled and re-opened as a Turkish cafe: Cappadocia Cafe. Opened by Vural and Jackie Oktay, the owners of next door Tuckerbox (which has had its own interesting voyage transitioning from a Australian-owned coffee shop to a Turkish restaurant, but hey, variety is the spice of life) and Cappadocia Bistro in Burlington, VT, Cappadocia is primarily a breakfast- and lunch-based counterpart to the more formal dinner menu of Tuckerbox, offering an array of pastries, wood-fired flatbreads, and related lighter dishes.

A few years ago, there was a pop-up donut bakery, Farmer and the bell, that was making French-style cruller donuts in the back of the Angkor Wat Cambodian restaurant in Woodstock, VT each weekend. After getting quite a following (they’d regularly sell out after only a few hours), they first moved to doing a slightly larger bakery space in the Parker House in Quechee, VT, serving up donuts on weekends in 2022, and still selling out quickly. In 2023, as the owners were starting their family, they put the business on pause, raised capital, and leased a spot in east Woodstock where an old former gas station had been a perennial eyesore, and built their own store, opening in early October 2025. We’d been meaning to go for several weeks, but most times we were passing through Woodstock, their parking lot was completely full, and we figured we’d come another time. But during early January, we finally had a chance to stop by and check them out.

As I’ve mentioned in a lot of my recent reviews, 2025 was a year of my trying to take a lot of the local places that I’m frequently driving by and saying “I should check that place out!” and actually, well, checking the place out. In this case, we were doing a day trip down to Connecticut, and wanting to grab breakfast on our usual route to catch Interstate 91 to parts south of here. Usually, that means a visit to The Barn Café or The Daily Grind in Claremont (neither of which I’ve reviewed, but the Daily Grind has the same excellent menu and food as their sister restaurant Frazer’s Place). However, both were looking more than a little busy, so we decided to cross the river and check out one of our perennial “should try” places, Exit Ate in Weathersfield, VT.

During our visit to Fort Lauderdale for the Fraternal Order of Moai FOMCon, we stayed at the Ocean Manor Beach Resort, one of Fort Lauderdale’s older and more venerable beach hotels (Johnny Carson had a penthouse there, and the Rat Pack were regular 60s and 70s visitors). And it has a reasonably good Tiki bar out back with a nice breakfast, but after a few days, we really felt we needed to explore a bit and find some broader breakfast items. Which led us to a smaller café a few blocks away on Ocean Boulevard called Brew It Café.

One of our goals at Offbeat Eats for the last few years has been to try and visit a bunch of those places that we’ve driven by several times and always thought to ourselves, “We should stop there.” Well, we’ve tried to be better about actually stopping at those places. In this case, our drives to the east often take us through the nice old mill town of Franklin, NH. If it’s around lunch or dinner, we’ve already reviewed two great places in Franklin, Broken Spoon and Vulgar Brewing Company, that we really enjoy, but we still hadn’t really done breakfast in Franklin. A recent trip through there at 8am, however, gave me good reason to stop by Wyatt’s Family Restaurant, on the west bank of the Pemigewasset River right before it merges with the Winnipesaukee River to form the Merrimack River.

As I mentioned a few months ago in my review of the Community Supper at the Union Episcopal Church in Claremont, NH, I’ve been trying to make it to more of the various community meals that spring up around the area. Harvest suppers. Fire department fund raisers. Non-profit fundraisers. That sort of thing. And that brings me to an event I had seen advertised a handful of times, a monthly community breakfast run by the Independent Order of Odd Fellows Forest Lodge #69 Breakfast. Held the third Sunday of each month from 8:00 to 11:00 am, the breakfast is served buffet-style, with scrambled eggs, eggs and omelettes to order, blueberry and plain pancakes, biscuits and sausage gravy, corned beef hash, homemade brown beans, homefries, bacon, sausage, fresh-carved ham, and various beverages. Oh, and they use real maple syrup.

Like my previous review of Big Apple Diner, driving between Saratoga Springs and New Hampshire four different times in September also had me passing by another entry on my perennial “I should check that place out” list. In this case, it was a place in Hudson Falls on US-4 as you are heading from Fort Ann into Glens Falls/Queensbury, Sally’s Hen House.

I love it when you pass by cozy little cafés and can immediately tell that the place is popular with the locals and has its set of “regulars”. That was the case with a small little cafe located just about two short blocks from my friends’ condo in Saratoga Springs: the Country Corner Café.

Last Spring, as we were doing one of our preparatory trips to Lake George for Ohana, we stopped in for dinner at Common Roots Brewery in South Glen Falls (our review here). At that visit, I had noticed that Common Roots (whose brewery building itself is relatively new) had been on quite the building spree. Across the parking lot from their main brewery, Common Roots also runs their Bierhall & Barrel House Private Event Center, which in the mornings also operates as Common Roots Café for breakfast. The space is quite nice, albeit extremely cavernous when not being used for events. Since I was passing through South Glens Falls in early September on my way to the Adirondacks, I decided it was a great opportunity to stop in for coffee and breakfast.

The last few years, Chef Jeff Porter has been moving around a lot. He was getting good reviews in South Carolina when he moved back to back to his hometown of Newport, NH, and after some time working as a chef at one local golf course, he opened a food truck in Newport. After a pretty good start in the food truck, he moved to brick and mortar, moving his restaurant, Breaking Bread, into another country club, the Newport Country Club (which I’ve never been to, but it’s one of those spots that seems quite itinerant, since it’s been a good half dozen different restaurants in my years living here). Finally, a pair of storefronts on Newport’s Main Street became available next to the police station, and he moved Breaking Bread downtown. On one of our recent trips to an event in Newport, we finally had a chance to stop by and check it out.